Gregory John Lee

Abstract: The movement or flow of employees into, around and out of organisations (‘employee flow’) has long been a central issue in human resource management and industrial psychology. This is especially so for the specific element of employee turnover, but also applies to staffing and internal talent development. Employee flow is especially salient in a South African context characterised by scarce skills. The voluminous literature on employee flow has tended to view each element such as recruitment or turnover separately, and has generally focused on internal outcomes (e.g. commitment or satisfaction). This thesis attempts to add two crucial features, namely EF as a whole system (i.e. inflows, intraorganisation flows and outflows of staff in conjunction), and customer-based outcomes. Something of a synthesis is thus sought between EF and ideas of marketing productivity. Marketing productivity has been proposed as one of the most important foci of the marketing discipline (Rust, Ambler, Carpenter, Kumar, & Srivastava, 2004; Sheth & Sisodia, 2002). It refers to links between marketing and organisational performance or value. Models such as the ‘service profit chain’ (Heskett, Sasser & Schlesinger, 1997) identify the antecedents of marketing productivity to be internal organisation characteristics such as staff satisfaction or loyalty. This thesis seeks to expand such models in the context of a system of EFs. Advanced decision theoretic utility theories of EF (e.g. Boudreau & Berger, 1985) allow for the complete, integrated value of employee movements over time to be modelled. Such a model is constructed and links to marketing metrics, notably service perceptions, investigated. Organisational value arising via the outcomes for customers are further